Something Worth Fighting For
by gentlewinnix
Summary: Brody is rescued from Caracas and brought down for one last mission. But there's nothing left for him- or is there? Gen.


**Author's Note: **I mostly just wrote this because I'm a sucker for the whump in this episode, whoops.

Tags include: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: s03e09 One Last Thing, Drug Withdrawal, Hepatitis C, Torture.

* * *

In Caracas, the days and weeks and maybe even months bleed into each other. Brody claws at dark stone walls until his fingers bleed and fills his veins with heroin, secretly hoping that one day there will be enough in the syringe to stop his heart. Sometimes Graham is there, abusing his prostrate body, sometimes the ghosts of his past accompany him in the dark, sweltering room.

But then there is Saul, who he only vaguely recognizes through the haze of drugs and his own body dying around him. Brody doesn't think twice of it until the man's fingers press against his neck, checking for a pulse. Comprehension is slow to come, but when it does, he twists his body and gasps, throat dry as he croaks out weakly, "help me," and passes out.

When he awakens again, the faint smell of disinfectant invades his nostrils and the loud roar of an engine rumbles deep in his chest. He's strapped upright into a seat. He raises his head and looks around blearily to see he's in a private airplane, and his stomach gives a sickening lurch as the plane jolts and dips briefly.

"Whoa there," a man exclaims, and a plastic bucket is placed onto his lap just as he empties the paltry contents of his stomach. "Looks like he's awake, gents."

"Please," Brody rasps, "I-I need it." His hands shake as he claws at the crook of his elbow, patterned with red and purple dots.

"He's already withdrawing," someone says. "We need to knock him out again somehow."

"This oughta work." A bottle is held to lips and he drinks greedily. Grimaces as the vodka burns down his throat. After a while it's taken away and he whines plaintively, reaching out blindly for the bottle as his vision blurs and the world shudders around him. His head feels heavy and his eyes fall shut unwillingly as unconsciousness takes him.

* * *

The next time he wakes up, it's to a penlight in his eyes. The light disappears and his eyes close again, but he becomes aware of a constricting pressure around his left bicep, moans as it sends sharp bolts of pain through the inside of his arm. He forces his eyes open, looks up blearily to see four men hovering over him.

"BP of 60 over 40," one of them reads.

"Too fucking low," another says. They all look at him. A headache pulses behind his eyes and he drops his head back against the pillow with a groan. He can feel sweat crawling down behind the shell of his ear. It's difficult to breathe.

The velcro rips. Brody sits up, startled, but there are hands on his shoulders and the men standing over him order him to lay down. They push him down as he keens weakly, lays back with a sharp exhale. Fingers press into the sallow skin of his neck.

"He started going cold turkey on the flight," someone says, "so they knocked him out with a half pint of vodka."

"Idiots," another man comments.

Brody vaguely recalls this, looks up at them, panting and shaky. A wave of agony washes through him, twists his stomach and squeezes his lungs. He arches his back, gasping through clenched teeth.

"Pulse is thready," the fingers retreat from his skin as he writhes on the bed. Something fires in his brain and he sits up again, crying out sharply as pain lances through his gut. Again, hands on his shoulders prevent him from sitting up fully. He coughs wetly, tries valiantly to fight them off, his heart pounding in his chest as terror squeezes his lungs and need makes his skin crawl.

"Take it easy."

They succeed in pushing him down once again and he whines, trying to twist out of their grasp. He remembers someone stealing his things in Caracas. Doesn't know where he is now.

"Where's my stuff, you fucking thieves?!" He fights with renewed vigor. "Fuck, where is my stuff?"

"Calm down, goddamn it!" A hand pushes hard on his sternum, shoving him roughly down onto the bed and holding him there now. A needle pushes into the tender skin of his inner elbow and he gasps, shudders, remembering Graham's leering face, remembers the heroin that saved his life and made the suffering go away. The tourniquet is pulled away and he tries to shake the hands off of him.

"Where's my stuff?" He keens out weakly.

"Don't move now," someone chides gently. He cranes his neck, presses his face into the cool skin of someone's arm, stays there when he realizes his own desperation for contact. Reality pulses in and out around him, and eventually all but one of the men have gone. The remaining man is seated in a chair, reading a magazine.

Brody rolls off of the bed, standing on coltish legs and observing the room around him for the first time. _Prison cell, _he thinks. He shivers, fumbles for the green wool blanket on the bed, notices dimly that he's been stripped down to his boxer shorts. With the blanket wrapped securely over his shoulders, he manages a few half-hearted steps forward before pain lances through his stomach again and he bends over, gasping sharply.

He manages another trembling step before he hits his knees, dry-heaving and curling in on himself until the pain recedes. As he struggles to stand again he feels unbearably hot, and tears the blanket off angrily, frustrated with the pain and the need and the weakness all attacking his frail body at once.

The other man gets up. "You alright?" He asks, going to retrieve the blanket. Brody turns, sees the table covered with medical equipment, feels a rush of pure _need, now, can't wait anymore, I need it so bad, NEED IT _, and runs to grab a syringe.

"Whoa, whoa whoa! Stop!" The man is behind him now, embracing him, reaching for it. "What are you doing?"

"I need it," Brody cries, fumbling with the packaging.

"There's nothing there for you."

"No, I need it now!" Brody sobs, his hands shaking too much to tear the packaging open. "Give it to me," he mutters, "give it to me, give it to me..." The door opens and two more men rush in, tackling him down onto the bed and taking the needle from him. They throw the blanket back over him as he gasps and pleads senselessly, the noise in his head drowning out his own voice.

* * *

Later - Brody had lost track of time - he's seized with waves of nausea and discomfort that leave him curled over the edge of the bed, retching and coughing, feeling bloated and sickly. He looks up to see Saul gazing through the window of the door and groans, too miserable to be angry or indignant.

Embarrassment, though, is not past him - and that comes when he can't make it to the toilet in time. The man who'd been watching him - he thinks his name is Yousef - has to carry him into the shower, where he and another man strip and wash him down.

The water burns his sensitive skin horribly, and he writhes beneath it, crying with the sheer force of his agony and embarrassment. If he weren't so closely guarded, wasn't gripped with such awful symptoms of withdrawal, surely he'd have found some way to end his own life by now.

Through the haze of fatigue and pain, Brody notices that the blood vessels beneath his sallow skin look swollen, web-like. Yousef mutters something about Hepatitis C as he lifts him out of the bathtub and drapes a fluffy towel over his shoulders. Brody draws it in tighter, shivering now as the cool air touches his wet skin, all too eager to be dressed and under his warm blankets again. They dress him in a worn grey t-shirt and dark slate sweatpants and half-carry him back to his cell.

When they inject him with the Ibogaine, he doesn't know what it is, and at first is grateful for the respite from the symptoms of his withdrawal. But it takes effect quickly enough, and he can't control the paranoia and the voices and the hallucinations, can't make the songs stop, can't make Tom Walker and Jess and Walden go away, and his willpower snaps. He knows they're watching him, hopes he's quicker than Saul or Yousef or Azizi, smashes the wooden chair and uses the broken leg to gouge a hole in his track-marked inner elbow.

Saul traps him against the wall and wrestles the thing out of his hand, and another needle slides into his skin. He remembers Abu Nazir and suicide.

* * *

He wakes up slowly. Wonders his life will continue in this manner, marked by when he falls asleep and wakes up. Wonders if Saul will throw him in prison once he's recovered. Looks up only to see the face of the man in question.

"You're alive," Saul observes mildly. Brody gives him a blank look, exhausted and at the end of his tether. "That wasn't a given." Brody shifts, pulls the pillow closer to him and curls around it. He lets out a soft grunt, pain twisting in his stomach and shooting up his injured arm, dulled now by his grogginess.

"Want some water?" Saul offers.

"Why couldn't you have just left me there to die?"

"I think you know that wasn't really an option."

"So..." Brody trails off, hurting and tired. "What now?"

"That'll be up to you."

"A trial? Because I didn't do it."

"You talking about bombing the CIA? I'm inclined to agree. There will be no trial- you're free if the real Langley bomber starts talking. But your transgressions don't begin or end there. And I'm not about to engage in a back and forth where you somehow end up the victim. We both know what you've done. We both know what you are. A man who's dug himself into a hole so deep, common sense'd tell you there's no way out." Saul leans forward. "I am telling you though, that there might be."

Brody doesn't twitch, disbelief evident in his stony gaze. "How?"

"I'm offering you a chance to be a Marine again." Brody blinks at Saul's words, still unconvinced. "The man you were...before they broke you."

He grimaces, breaking eye contact. "Please. No more," he pushes his face into his pillow, retreating into himself. "I'm done."

"You are not. You will do this one last thing," Saul insists.

"No," Brody rasps. "So kill me. Kill me now," he chokes out the last word, coughing dryly. Saul stands, moving to sit beside him on the bed. He rests a hand on his shoulder in sympathy. Brody knows that Saul may not particularly like Brody, but he isn't a monster. He hates to watch another person suffer.

"You want to die, huh?" Brody looks up at him, pleading silently with his red-rimmed eyes. "We'll see about that."

* * *

That night they put him on a boat and dump him overboard into the lake. He lets himself sink, sucking water into his lungs, eager to drown and end everything. They drag him out of the water soon enough. He coughs and splutters; choking, gasping, and shivering in the cold night air as the boat heads back to the safehouse.

With his only foreseeable chance of escape gone, Brody retreats further into himself. He curls up in his bed and refuses to move or eat, growing feverish and sickly. Coupled with the nausea and crippling pains in his stomach, there's a tingling sensation deep in his lungs and he's gripped by coughing spells often. He welcomes the illness, the possibility of death. He's so tired of hanging on to life when there's nothing for him to go back to.

Saul, however, is not so willing to let Brody go.

"He went down like a stone. No attempt to save himself whatsoever," Azizi reports to Dar Adal.

"Now he's refusing to eat," Yousef adds. He has the bruises and teeth marks on his arm to show for it. Grimly, Dar Adal glances between the two of them.

"Make him," he orders.

"How do you expect us to do that?" Yousef retorts.

"It's called force-feeding."

Azizi cuts in. "All due respect, sir, the guy's a waste of space. Now, I suggest whatever you've got in mind for him, just push it six months. Let us do this thing right."

"You done letting us in on your thought process?" Saul asks sharply, and Azizi turns to look at him, jaw clenched.

"Yes, sir."

"Get him to eat."

Azizi nods reluctantly and leaves the room, Yousef trailing along behind. They both know that Brody can't afford to lose any more weight, having dropped 30 pounds while out of country. Any more weight loss would likely compromise his immune system completely.

"It just feels wrong," Yousef sighs, "to force him like this. It's practically torture."

"Well, it's not the first time he's been tortured," Azizi remarks, prepping the equipment. "Besides, it'll be over in thirty minutes and he can go back to sulking." It's not much, the same system used in the Guantanamo Prison hunger strikes: a chair with restraints and a feeding tube with a packet of Ensure. It's a last resort, of course - Brody had fought tooth and nail when they'd tried to feed him crackers and sliced cheese before, biting at everything but the food and throwing punches blindly, begging them to _just let me die _in accented Arabic.

Presently, Azizi and the other two SEALs drag Brody out of his room and wrestle him into the chair. He fights with all he's got, but his weakened state ultimately leads him to failure, and he resigns himself to the restraints, angry tears streaking down his pale cheeks.

Yousef cringes as Azizi pushes the feeding tube into Brody's nose none too gently, eliciting a whimper of distress from the redhead.

After the packet is emptied, they take it out and leave him the chair for another ten minutes to make sure he can't force himself to vomit the food up. Yousef watches over him, noticing the sickly pale-yellow pallor of his skin, his shortness of breath, and wonders if he'd gone and gotten sick after their little trip into the river. Brody rests his head back against the seat and turns away from him, ashamed.

"Don't look at me," he rasps, sniffling.

"It doesn't have to be this way," Yousef chides gently. "You coulda just eaten before."

"No," Brody shakes his head, "I don't _want _to eat. Why won't you just let me die?"

"Saul's orders." Yousef shrugs. "Sorry, kid."

"What does he _want _from me? Haven't I already paid the price for what I decided _not _to go through with? I've lost everything, isn't that enough?"

"I guess we've got a bit of a zero-tolerance policy, Brody. You did it once - well technically, twice, as there was no way Carrie surviving Abu Nazir and Walden's death were just coincidences - and there's no forgiveness for that. Saul wants to give you this last mission as your 'chance at redemption.'" He leans forward conspiratorially.

"To be straight with you, I doubt you'll make it out alive," Yousef continues. "Too many people want you dead, and sending you out of country takes your life out of Saul's hands. It's convenient, then, that you've gone and gotten sick. Maybe you'll have a chance to get out of this, and the real Langley bomber will come forward. Maybe he won't, and you'll spend the rest of your life in federal maximum security prison. Of course, you _could _just kill yourself, but I doubt Carrie wants to raise your child alone."

"My _child?" _Brody repeats, incredulous. His eyes are wide, focused now. "Carrie's pregnant?"

"Thirteen weeks," Yousef confirms. He doesn't divulge how he'd found out, leaves Brody to think on that when he frees him from the restraints and escorts him back to his room.

There's plenty of time to think, in there.


End file.
